Western Union, the company best known for charging you ~15% to wire your money to recipients around the world, is possibly taking a crack at crypto services again, based on trademark filings made last week. As remittance (a sum of money sent, especially by mail, in payment for goods or services or as a gift) channels are increasing, Western Union has tried to stay competitive by attempting several times to provide services through crypto, will very little success. Once partnering with Ripple in 2015 to provide remittance services, they stayed in a test phase for three years before dropping the endeavor altogether. Trademark Attorney Mike Kondoudis posted on Twitter what the company is planning to now do:

Cross-border remittances services are only getting hotter and more crowded, as Coinbase also started a remittance service in Mexico recently and leading other crypto services into the space.

At first, I thought I was missing something here. Isn’t the a major point of crypto-networks to help remove intermediaries like Western Union? Where we don’t need a broker to take a fee to do something within a system that was built to allow average people to do the same with ease? However, I remembered something….fiat. Not only are the majority of people out there are non-crypto users, but 99.99% of us still have reliance on fiat. We can’t just pay our rent or bills with crypto (except for maybe some extreme fringe cases) so we need a way to convert our crypto to fiat. And that’s where remittance services like Western Union and Coinbase are needed, for now. So enjoy your time for now, because once the crypto revolution truly takes hold and we all are fully transacting solely on the blockchain, your services will no longer be needed.

Written by: nikethereum.eth / Medium / Mirror